


you are not weak because your heart is heavy

by eudaimon



Category: Ripper Street
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-23
Updated: 2013-02-23
Packaged: 2017-12-03 09:45:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/696939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone reacts to tragedy in their own way; the men of Leman Street take stock in the wake of loss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you are not weak because your heart is heavy

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has **MAJOR SPOILERS** for an episode that has not yet aired in the U.S (episode 7 - "A Man of My Company"). If you haven't seen the episode then please, don't read the fic until after you have.
> 
> I started thinking about this fic while the episode was still running, and then I had to get it written before I could write anything else. Call it catharsis.

_(1. a fight he cannot win)_

The water is unspeakably cold. It steals his breath and he fights to think of his mum or something, anything, other than the thought of floating without being found, forever, circling the world, lost in the tide. 

And maybe nobody would ever know what became of poor Dick Hobbs.  
Not a soul.

The worst of it, though, the very worst - what Captain Jackson said comes back to him at the last. He kicks for sure but finds himself capable of no more than sinking. 

In his head, he kicks with all his might.

_Oh, God. Oh, Mum. Oh, Inspector Reid._

And, still, Captain Jackson’s voice. Inspector Reid, too, and Sergeant Drake. He’d always liked listening to them talk, only, now he can’t remember one other thing that they used to say, not with his lungs screaming, his heart pounding and every single still living part of him clawing for air and making not able to make a single sound. 

*

_(2. a god of war and thunder)_

When he was just a lad, a tiny and helpless thing, his dear old mum used to talk to him about God. She was old fashioned, his mum, and she believed more in the Old Testament than the New – a god of fire and brimstone, war and thunder. Donald Artherton is a man of small faith; he goes to church regularly enough but he always finds it hard to leave Leman Street behind him. He sees them in the shadows – all of the loathsome things that are done by men to other men in this city, in all cities, under the eyes of God. He’s never known how to reconcile that with the God that this mother talked about: the one who punished the wicked, the one which righted wrongs and lead those chosen ones through the desert, to a land of peace and plenty.

Take the boy, for example. Take poor Dick Hobbs.

Artherton has always viewed his role as Desk Sergeant as a sort of sacred duty; he doesn’t expect the others to understand. He stands and serves as the bridge between the Inspector and the common man, the everyday boy in his blue. He might be harsh on them, but only because he expects better from them – only because he wants to see them grow. And, mostly, they do, but only so far. Hobbs, though; Artherton had begun, recently, to suspect that there might be no end to what the boy might achieve He couldn’t help it, what he felt. 

Maybe pride was too close to vanity. Maybe he hoped too much?

What other explanation could there be, he wonders? Hard to imagine another reason on God’s green earth. 

What he will never forget, as long as he lives, is the way that it felt to see the lad’s body for the first time. They came in carrying it on a stretcher and, at first, he barely looked up to see what they had; bodies are common, after all, and there is always another terrible thing to be unpicked and unpacked and solved. It had taken him a moment, unforgivably long, to recognise the look on the men’s face and to ask them who it was that they were carrying, under that sodden sheet. Why did they look so bereft?

He’d had to see Hobbs, to be sure, before he sent boys running to bring Inspector Reid, Sergeant Drake, Captain Jackson. All of them.

Let every man come. 

Artherton had felt something in his chest harden, even then, standing in the dead room by the dead boy’s feet. As a man, he’s always struggled with the idea of faith – he’s found it difficult to believe in goodness, living through the Ripper as he did, seeing what can be done, what damage can be wrought to the fragility of human flesh.

How easy it is for a man to bleed.

Standing in the hall outside the dead-room, watching the Inspector Reid and Drake strip the boy out of his hard-won civvies, Artherton finds himself remembering what it was that his mum had always believed. He thinks about a God that might punish the wicked. He imagines the line between Heaven and Hell as uncrossable, once passed over. And he considers how there are so few soft places left in him - how this work, this calling, has worn them down, scraped them away, until there is the merest trace of human sympathy left in him at all.

And then the Inspector tells him how Hobbs died and Artherton feels that last shred stripped clean away. There is nothing in him now. There is air where his heart was. His blood is fire and thunder.

“We might kill them, might we not?” he asks and he phrases it as a question but that isn’t quite what he means. There is no question here – there can be no uncertainty if, once, his dear old mum believed in a god of fire and thunder and if Dick Hobbs, dear good Dick Hobbs who was nineteen years old and tried so very, very hard, lies dead.

No, not dead. Lies _murdered_.

Retribution seems like a ladder. Something to be climbed towards, if not peace, then the quiet that comes after rage.

Artherton finds himself in desperate need of something to believe.

And he’s always believed in Inspector Reid (they all have, haven’t they?) but, tonight, it’s easier to put his faith in blood. And how it may be spilt.

*  
( _3\. and nothing but noise_ )

Oh, _Hobbs_.

He stands in the street for what seems to be an age or more, unable to conjure up even the slimmest morsel of courage. He has lived through the longest day which bled into the longest night, then day again. Hours have lost meaning. Every passing minute is a tiny act of violence.

And it isn’t over yet.  
He fears the worst is still to come.

No, not the worst. Even as he thinks it, he sees the lie in that. The worst is already over with, and done. The worst was stripping those sodden clothes and finding Hobbs underneath, pale and slim, a boy’s body. Reid had almost forgotten how young Hobbs was and how many and varied ways there were for that to be ruined. He should have remembered; he’d seen it done enough times before on these streets.

And he too must have been as young as Hobbs was, once. But it feels like an entirely different life, a million years removed from the existence which finds him standing on this simple, worn threshold, without the courage to even raise his hand and knock.

He does knock, of course. He owes Hobbs that much, at least.

Grief lies heavy over the whole house like a smog, like a sickness. Reid recognises it but its taste; it’s one that’s lain on his tongue these last twelve months. The curtains are drawn; the mirrors are covered. No light comes in. A much loved boy, an only son, is dead.

Mrs Hobbs sits in a chair by the fireplace, twisting her fingers around a handkerchief in her lap. She is one of those plump women, flushed-cheeked and usually smiling. Now, she doesn’t look up. Her eyes are on the hearth. There’s a girl (a sister, perhaps), sitting at the table, bent over needle-work. Any hint of _perhaps_ evaporates, however, when she looks up and Reid finds himself looking at Hobb’s very echo, made flesh. _Kate_ , he remembers. Her name is Kate and Hobbs talked about her, from time to time: his pretty sister, who laughed a lot and liked to dance. And will dance no longer. Or, at least, not for a while. No until the weight has lifted from this house. Because the oldest child (who was Reid’s youngest, also) is dead and that leaves them all ripped open and raw, where they should be whole. Nowhere worse than these women here. Nobody suffers this more than they do.

“Mrs Hobbs,” he says, hat in hand. “Miss Hobbs. I am so very, very sorry for H-.” He pauses. No, not that. Not right. He swallows. Tries again. “For Dick. We are all so very, very sorry.”

Those are all the words he has. Everything else would be nothing but noise.

*  
( _4\. more than the weight of his heart_ )

His apartment feels much smaller, much darker, without Rose in it. But what else was he to do? His whole life has taught him but a single lesson: that a man cannot build his acts on shifting sand. That much became clear out in the desert and he must hold onto it now, more than ever, now the rage is back and he can feel its familiar heat. What he needs now are sure foundations, and Rose is anything but that.

One thing _is_ certain: it should never have been the boy. Better any of the rest of them than that. Drake would have gone in his place, and maybe things would have been different, if he had?

And, God, the rage in him now.

The immediacy of it does not last long, however. He stands and watches Jackson put a bullet in Goodnight’s brain and he feels the heat slip away again, into darkness, into some place that he might more easily contain it. Safer, for now.

There is a story about a goddess who could heal the wounded and breathed life into dead sand. Once, there was another man named Bennet Drake who bathed in blood and tore skin and bone apart with his bare hands. A low man. A troubled man. A man said spells over him and healed him. A holy man took his rage away and locked it in a box. And things are better now, but he has the key. What he knows is this: that it would come if he called, like a faithful dog to his heel.

And, God knows, he often wants to call it.

On the couch where Rose so recently lay, he falls into a fitful sleep and dreams that he is carrying the boy through the desert. Above them, a grey sky howls. Hobbs weighs no more than a feather in Drake’s arms. He hears Faulkner’s voice talking about how it was ever foolish to try and measure the weight of one man’s heart; Drake might not know much, but he does know something about that – hasn’t he been dragging around the dead weight of his own heart for half a lifetime?

In the dream, the boy is so very, very light and Drake folds him like paper and slips him into the inside pocket of his jacket, close to his heart. The jacket is one that he hasn’t worn in a very long time. It’s a military jacket, a soldier’s coat. Its colour is worn and bloody and it fits him like a second skin. Once a soldier, always a soldier; he understands that much. But Dick Hobbs was not a soldier. Dick Hobbs was a policeman, was Blue, and he was good at it, too – anyone could have seen that. He’d have grown into a detective that someone like Inspector Reid could be proud of.

Someone like Drake could have been proud of him, too.  
Someone like Drake bloody well _was_.

In the dream, in the way of dreams, he knows that they’ve come to the place that they’re seeking – a place of judgement. Gently, he lays the boy down on the scale, pausing, for a moment, to straighten his hair and his jacket. He places the tiny silver ship in the curl of Hobbs’ hand, in the cradle of his palm, like an offering.

Drake wakes up before much else, with the taste of _you did so well, son. I’m so proud,_ still on the tip of his tongue.

These dark days, it seems like all the world is made of ghosts.

 

*  
( _5\. a life in the ruins_ )

 _Shouldn’t have killed the boy, Frank._  
He has no other truth but that.

A fact: Frank Goodnight is not the first man that Homer Jackson has shot in the head and he _definitely_ wasn’t the first man that Matthew Judge shot in the head. He probably won’t be the last for either of them.

_Because life is violent and hard, darlin’, and sometimes it’s the best who suffer, when it ought to be the worst. That’s just the way it is._

Which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt.

They walk to the house arm in arm. If asked, he’d swear blind that he can’t remember the last time that they were so close for so long. Which would be a lie, because he remembers every single second, every brush of their fingers, every kiss. Three months, three years ago and it was as close to Heaven as a man like him’s got any right to expect.

Which brings him back to Hobbs.

All his life, he’s had but one reaction to death: it makes him want to hold the good things close. He’s no stranger to finding things that feel good to balance out the things that feel like hell and, right now, what feels good is pulling Susan’s body in against his, feeling the bones of her stays push in hard against him through his shirt. At some point, he stopped thinking of her as Caitlin or Cait or any of those little, secret things that he used to call her. Matthew Judge became a memory. Everything in the world is an echo.

All they have is what they are right now, right here.

Susan’s arm curls around his neck. Finally, he lets himself react to what has happened here. After Frank Goodnight fell, Jackson didn’t go back into Lemen street, so he hasn’t seen a body. It feels like it might be possible to pretend that all of this is a bad dream – that Reid was, in fact, mistaken and that Hobbs got up, and walked away. Tomorrow, he’ll go to the dead room and Hobbs will assist with one thing or another and Jackson will teach him one more bit of everything that he knows.

But Reid is so rarely wrong about anything and Jackson, more than anyone, knows exactly what Frank Goodnight was capable of.

So Hobbs must be dead, and there must be nothing that anyone can do, other than what he’s already done.

He doesn’t weep; he’s long past weeping (maybe, once upon a time, a man named Judge might have shed a tear for William Goodnight, but that day is a long time past). He stands in Susan’s arms and closes his eyes, feels the whole weight of the world on his shoulders for a moment before it slips away. He was nineteen years old, no older than Hobbs, when he first signed his name for the U.S Army. When he first wore a uniform. It had been that or a rope but at least he’d had a chance.

A chance that Hobbs won’t get now. _Because sometimes life is brief, and brutal and if anyone ever told you that it was fair?_

_Darlin’, they lied._

Eventually, he pulls away from her. Their home lies in ruins – they’ve got pictures to hang and beds to remake. Everything will be different now. They have lives to build in the ashes.

*  
( _6\. of legend and banner headline_ )

Pain is a great focuser; he finds it in him to work late into the night. Fred Best might recognise the value of a good story but, more than that, he knows that it isn’t the winners who writes the histories. Not anymore.

It’s the men like him.

More than most, Fred Best knows the value of secrets. He writes the story that he can tell and it’s mostly the story of Homer Jackson and Frank Goodnight, who are the stuff of legend, yes, and banner headline. But it’s also a quieter story, a whispered tale of a boy named Dick Hobbs. No, not a boy. A man.

And one who tried.  
It’s a good story. It’s one that needs telling, and it might as well be by him.


End file.
